


30 Prompts

by Imbroglio



Category: Marvel
Genre: Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:31:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4584399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imbroglio/pseuds/Imbroglio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles based on writing prompts. The intention was one sentence each, but...yeah. Didn't happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Evidence

He didn’t need any proof of the seventy years he had missed, because the nurse who first greeted him was so obviously _wrong_ he knew immediately. As he read the files, the articles, the brief summations of the six decades that went on without him while he was frozen, he wasn’t trying to make sense of this new world. He was trying to find a mistake, a plot hole, so that he could call it all a dying dream and go back to being frozen.


	2. I'm Here

The first thing when one gets back is always a phone call, two words—“I’m here.” Nothing sentimental, nothing emotional, because even when things went sour and one of them could easily have come home in a body bag, or not at all, they just don’t have the life to allow it. That’s what she tells herself, anyway. The real reason, the one she never puts into words, is that the emotional homecomings, the tears and the prayers, belong to Laura, and that’s a line Natasha never wants to cross.


	3. Funeral

Clint attends Pietro’s funeral, and he’s almost the only one—Wanda’s there, sitting next to the plain wooden casket with dry eyes and loose hands; Rogers is there, looking at Wanda like he wants to say something but doesn’t know what; Natasha’s there in a back corner, looking at the closed casket and not at the grieving sister. But Clint’s the one who owes the boy, who’s the reason they’re having a funeral in the first place, so he sits inside the circle the others seem to be giving Wanda, and he thinks of Coulson, who he’s not supposed to know about but who he knows is alive, and although he knows the casket is closed for religious reasons, he hopes it’s closed for other reasons as well.


	4. Puppy Love

Bruce has left his home, his career, his friends, his family, Betty, the life he had managed to scrape together in Calcutta, and then he’d found something that worked with the other guy, that he thought he wouldn’t have to leave behind. It’s not true, of course; he’s always going to be leaving things behind, and this times it’s the people who understand him, who value him for both him and the other guy, and the woman who understands what it’s like to leave things behind and have a monster inside you, and it hurts. But they’ll be able to find reasons for his leaving them. His dog, who had been his only real companion for a long time, would never know why Bruce had abandoned her.


	5. Gloves

He wears gloves, even when he’s stopped running and start letting Rogers talk about this Bucky person who he apparently was once, even when the thinnest fabric broils his flesh hand. Rogers doesn’t seem to like it, seems like he would rather see the weapon hand even with the knowledge of all the lives it’s taken, but the first Christmas he gives Barnes a pair of garish argyle gloves that have a reindeer head with a nose that lights up, for whatever reason, and little bells that jingle stitched into the hem. Barnes stuffs the bells with clay and dismantles the light bulbs. He wears them until Rogers gives up and gets him a new pair.


	6. Blackboard

Tony isn’t always the most sensitive person on the planet, and he knows that, but sometimes he just doesn’t care; for instance, when he meets the Winter Soldier, who is very scary despite the ridiculous gloves, he doesn’t wait long before mentioning the fact that Barnes killed his parents, among other people. It turns into a fight; not a physical fight, thank god, because Barnes is, in fact, very scary, but a verbal fight in whispers outside in the hall with Steve looming over him, angrier than Tony has ever seen him, and when they go back to the room with Tony just barely resigned to being polite, Barnes is gone. Later, Natasha shows up in his lab with a green blackboard and a piece of yellow chalk and makes him take notes on the proper behavior toward brainwashed super soldiers. She gives him a few choice stories from her own past, just enough that he knows he never wants to hear the full story, and he backs off. Eventually, he warms up to Barnes—maybe only because Steve would tear the world apart if anything happened to the guy, and Tony trusts Steve enough to look for whatever it is he still sees in Barnes—but they’ll never be more than respectful of each other. It’s a shame. In a better world, without dead parents and Nazi torture, Tony would have loved showing Barnes the brighter sides of modern tech.


End file.
